20s (2023)

Another group post! Some with great results, some stuff that we probably won't make again, but always good to try new things.

Week 21: hot sauce

Hot sauce was a tough challenge, trying to make something that would be palatable to a 4-year-old who doesn't really like spice yet. I didn't want to make my own hot sauce, didn't want to buy a new hot sauce that we weren't going to use much of, and didn't want to really make hot sauce the focus. After a lot of searching, I found a recipe for yuzu hot sauce pound cake on Ciao Bella Kitchen, and decided that would work. It used the yuzu hot sauce from Trader Joe's, which we already had and enjoy adding to various dishes, so at least it wouldn't be a purchase gone to waste. The cake was fine, but I learned I don't really prefer my cake with a little zing.

Week 23: boards

I'm not a huge fan of the "arranging" or "plating" type challenges, so A helped me choose what type of board to make that B might actually eat. We went with a chopped salad with red onions, tomatoes, olives, mozzarella cheese, pepperoni, cucumbers, and artichokes with a homemade vinaigrette consisting of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, maple syrup, and dijon mustard. Really good salad!

Week 24: most requested

This challenge choice was a little tough because what did it really mean? Who was doing the requesting? In the end, I consulted Food & Wine's list of the most popular recipes of 2022 and chose the first on the list, an Italian wedding risotto. I love risotto and have been making it more and more (got to use up all the rest of the arborio rice!). This turned out well, and we could see why it was so popular last year.

Week 27: alliteration

I was really ambitious for the alliteration challenge, at least with the name. I had started out with chicken corn chowder and carrot cake cookies, but then just kept adding to it until I ended up with cheesy chicken, carrot, celery, and corn chowder with crushed cheez-its covering + carrot cake cookies with cream cheese and confetti coating. The soup was based on a recipe from Lil Luna, and we really liked it. I would definitely make that again, although the cheez-its weren't really necessary. I just wanted more letter Cs.

The cookies came from Love and Lemons, and while tasty, I only have a mild like for carrot cake, so that one might not be repeated. We do still have some in our freezer though since it made a bigger batch than we could eat at one time, so we can still have more!

Week 29: candying

My original plan for this challenge was to make tanghulu, but I never got around to it and then made some candied lemons. I don't remember what recipe I followed, but I think most candied lemons are made the same way, so anything on Google would probably work. I think my expectations were completely off though, because I was expecting something like those sugary lemon slices that you could just eat as candy, and these were... not. The rind was a little too hard, and they were extremely sour, even with all the sugar that was added to them. I think maybe my brain and taste buds were expecting actual candy versus candied lemons, but once I realized how sour these were, I had no idea what to do with them. We tried eating some plain, but never figured it out before they were out too long and ended up tossing a bunch. I don't think I would do this again without a specific plan for them.

Butter, Berries, and Botched Burmese Bowl

It's been a while since I posted here. May?! I thought it was more recent, but then realized there was a lot of stuff in drafts. So, what's been going on since May? Summer came and went in the blink of an eye. We went on our first plane trip since COVID arrived in 2020. We've explored more destinations in the AtWCC, and I've been keeping up with the 52 week cooking challenge, but you'd never know that since there aren't any posts here.

To remedy that, unless there is a reason for a separate post (like if it's also counting for the AtWCC), or unless it's one of the ones already languishing in drafts, I think I'm going to group together some of the 52 week challenge posts. For some of them, there just isn't that much to say. I made them, they fit the challenge, and that's that. So, in an attempt to catch up and so that I'm not finishing writing about the challenge next March like I did for last year's, here are weeks 31 through 35.

Week 31: Butter

For Week 31, I made a mixed berry cake with butter sauce. It wasn't the most photogenic cake, but it definitely spotlighted the theme ingredient - butter. The original recipe from Taste of Home used cranberries, but it was the middle of the summer with no cranberries to be found in the grocery store outside of canned cranberry sauce, so I used strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries (frozen, actually, since fresh berries are expensive and we prefer eating those fresh). It was the rest of the bag of frozen berries from last year's failed akutaq plus some extra frozen raspberries, and I just kept hoping that this would be a better use of those berries than the last time.

Following the instructions, I actually got a little bit stressed out that this was going to be an akutaq repeat, because after I added the milk to the creamed butter-sugar mixture, everything started to look clumpy and curdled. It was still lumpy after the flour, so I had very low expectations. When it came time to make the butter sauce for the top, I ran into another complication because I hadn't noticed the half-and-half on the ingredient list. Oops. From some internet research, I found out that someone mixed olive oil with soy milk, and it had the same effect. I was skeptical since it looked like a pool of oil when it started on the stove, but it really came together as a nice, thick glaze. I have no idea why it worked, but it did. Overall, the cake turned out delicious. Super sweet and super buttery, but successful! If we can get some fresh cranberries in the fall, this may turn up on our meal plan again.

Week 32: Chamorro

This one is going to get its own post, because it's going to count for Guam!

Week 33: Allergies

For allergies week, I tried to get as many of the top 9 allergens (wheat, milk, eggs, soy, fish, shellfish, peanut, tree nuts, sesame) in one dish as possible. So this pasta dish had tricolor spaghetti (wheat) with peppers and onions in a peanut ginger sauce (peanuts, soy, sesame), topped with crispy tofu (more soy), salmon (fish), and slivered almonds (tree nuts). I've made this dish a number of times before (with just tofu), but it had been a while, so I didn't realize we were out of unexpired almond butter. The slivered almonds look like a last minute add-on, and they were, since I wanted to do tree nuts but didn't have almond butter.

The ones I left out were shellfish (inspired by a recent back of the cupboard challenge, I tried to only use proteins we already had at home), eggs (because of B's allergy), and milk (lactose intolerance over here). 6 out of 9 was pretty good! The dish didn't come out as well as I would have liked because I think it needed more sauce and had more sauce in the past, but at least it still tasted fine.

Week 34: Oats

Oat-crusted chicken and oat risotto were on the menu for the oats challenge. The chicken was brined in vegan buttermilk that had an oat milk base and then crusted with oats. A did most of the work for the chicken, since these are chicken tenders he makes often and they're always so good. For the oat risotto (which A really wanted me to call ris-oat-to), I used a recipe from Allrecipes, added mushrooms, and it was fantastic. I would make the risotto again.

Week 35: Burmese

Burmese week sounds like a shoo-in for an AtWCC post, but this one was an absolute failure. I was hoping to make tohu thoke, a yellow tofu salad and one of my favorite Burmese dishes ever. (If it looks familiar here, this salad made our top 10 food memories list back in 2010, and we also posted about Rangoon in Philadelphia, which sadly no longer exists). Unfortunately, it didn't set at all. The tofu had the consistency of pudding and was not solid at all. I'm not sure what went wrong. Did I chill it for too long? Did I mess up something from the recipe (which I followed from YouTube because I couldn't find the related website)?

The yellow tofu itself was made of chickpea flour (besan), water, salt, and turmeric, and it really thickened up on the stove, so I thought it would just need some time to solidify. I used different toppings from the video, trying to mimic the ones we've had at the food fairs, using cilantro, fried onions (didn't have fried shallots or an easy way to get them), lime juice, fish sauce, tamarind, and garlic. The taste, especially in certain bites, was really reminiscent of what we'd gotten in the past, but the texture was not. I do intend to try this again (have a giant container of besan right now), and hopefully it will turn out better next time and be worthy of an AtWCC post.

More challenge catch-ups coming (hopefully very) soon!

Week 27 - Floral

Wow, where did the past couple of weeks go? I thought I'd be done with these challenge recaps for 2021 by now, but seem to have lost steam after the big end-of-year push. Time to get back into it!

The floral challenge took place back in July, but it turned out to be the last challenge I completed for the year (on the last day!). I intended to make it earlier, but I had decided on lemon lavender donuts based on a recipe from Short Girl Tall Order, and first, I needed to get a donut pan. (We actually got some silicone donut baking cups, but same thing.) Then, I had to get pastry flour, which wasn't always available during our online shopping (and isn't sold at places like Trader Joe's). Once I finally had that, I just never seemed to find the time or energy to actually make them until right up against the deadline.

Had extra batter after filling the cups so made "cake"

Making the donuts didn't turn out quite how I expected either. (New Year's Eve seemed like a cooking day full of mishaps anyway - just wait until the Week 44 post.) I followed all the instructions, but the batter was super thin and runny, thinner than most of my pancake batter. That didn't seem quite right, and I wasn't sure how it would hold together, so I added more pastry flour to it until it thickened up. I put the batter into the cups, and shockingly, they did turn into actual donuts, but they still fell apart pretty easily. I'm not sure what I did wrong.

Little B couldn't even wait for them to be glazed before eating one

I made the glaze and added more powdered sugar to make it thicker, but even after dunking the donuts in the glaze on all sides, you can't even see it on there. It was definitely there, and they were sticky from the glaze, but this is not what glazed donuts should look like (in my opinion). Again, not sure what I did wrong.

Invisibly glazed

I don't think the problem is the recipe since it turned out some great-looking donuts there, but my first adventure baking donuts didn't turn out too well. I haven't given up completely and will try again another time, but for now, maybe I'll just stick with cookies. Even though I was disappointed with my final product, it wasn't all bad though. It was the primary thing B ate for New Year's Eve night, and he really seemed to like them, so I'm still glad I made them.

Week 15 - Chocolate

Although the Week 15 challenge took place back in April, I didn't actually complete it until it was time to make Christmas cookies in December. I kept intending to make some chocolate cookies, but just never got around to it, putting it off week after week, sometimes changing my mind about which cookies I was going to make. In the end, I decided to make some chocolate chocolate chip cookies, topping some with Andes mints, adapting the recipe I found on Chocolate with Grace.

I followed the recipe closely, other than replacing the egg with a flax egg and substituting chocolate chips for the Andes mint baking pieces because I didn't have the latter. I also only put one Andes mint on top and only on about half the cookies, since I wasn't sure if B would be a fan, having never had Andes mints before. I was a little concerned that the mint topping wasn't going to work when it hadn't melted after one minute, which was what the recipe indicated, but it just took a little longer and ended up being fine. The cookies were really good, and I would make them again.

Week 18 - Lime

Lime was the Week 18 challenge, and while there were many savory options for lime, I was just in the mood for cookies. I found a recipe for vegan coconut lime sugar cookies on Short Girl Tall Order, and they looked so amazing that I knew that was the one to try. I skipped the glaze to make my life easier, but the cookies were so good that I didn't miss it at all.

I mostly followed the recipe, other than skipping the icing and not measuring some of the ingredients, which made our ingredient list look like this:

- 1 stick vegan butter (softened)

- just under 1/2 cup of sugar + about 2 tbsp of sugar for rolling

- a few tbsp of shredded dried coconut

- zest of 1 lime

- pinch of salt

- juice of 2 limes (about 2 tbsp)

- 1 tbsp ground flaxseed

- 1 cup + 3 tbsp all-purpose flour

- 1/4 tsp baking powder

- 1/4 tsp baking soda

When baking, I do usually try to stick more closely to the recipe, so first was creaming the butter together with the sugar, dried coconut, and lime zest.

Next was adding the lime juice and ground flaxseed, and once those were mixed together, adding the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, baking soda, pinch of salt) to form a batter.

That went into the fridge to chill for a bit. It was supposed to be 30-60 minutes, but I exercised and then took a shower, and that whole process took over an hour. It was a bit too cold to work with when I pulled it out, so we let it warm up 10 minutes or so. It was a little crumbly when I started to form the cookie balls, but got easier to work with as time went on.

I made our cookies with a 2 tbsp scoop so we could get more cookies, and ended up with about 15 of them. They all got rolled in sugar before going onto the parchment-lined baking sheet. Our sugar cookies always end up looking brown since the sugar we have on hand is usually turbinado sugar.

They baked for 11 minutes in the oven at 350 degrees, then a quick tap on the counter and sitting on the baking sheet for a little longer before moving to the cooling rack. It was only supposed to be 10 minutes, but I lost track of time since I was making dinner and forgot them for a bit. They were still fine and not overdone!

The cookies were delicious and perfect for the lime challenge. That first bite had a really strong flavor of lime. We all loved them, and I would make these again.

Week 34 - Batter

It's been a very long time since we've posted here for a lot of reasons. One, we went on vacation to California, which was lovely but took up a good portion of the last month between preparation, trip, and recovery. Second, it's been hectic and crazy dealing with a lot of other non-food-related stuff and we haven't had much time to write. Third, we've been trying to figure out what the best use of our writing time is for this blog versus other outlets and review sites and the like. Not saying we've figured it out, but for sure, one thing this is good for is accountability with respect to the 52 week cooking challenge. I definitely need that because I am so, so, so behind (as in, I still have challenges to do that were from weeks before vacation).

Anyway, the Week 34 challenge was batter, something I don't make very much of and am trying to actively make less of at home for various health reasons. I had already planned something with batter for the Week 36 challenge (post coming soon), so the idea of doing two challenges with batter wasn't really that enticing to me. At the time of these challenges, A was making almond cake almost every week or every other week, so that seemed appropriate for the batter challenge. A simple batter of almond flour, eggs, sugar, cinnamon, and lemon zest, and it turns into this magnificent cake that is gluten-free, dairy-free, and delicious. Best use of batter in our household this year, so good enough for me for Week 34.

Week 28 - Vanilla

After baking and berries, seeing vanilla pop up on the challenge list was a little painful. All of those things would be great if I were making desserts for the challenge, but I have been pretty set on sticking with dinner whenever possible. There was a vanilla challenge during my first year doing this challenge and I made some tasty macaroons, but really wasn't feeling inspired to make any dessert with vanilla this time around. Been there, done that, don't really feel like making more vanilla-flavored things. I looked at all the vanilla submissions that other people sent in and other sites of vanilla-filled recipes, but couldn't find a single savory dish I wanted to make, so I just decided I wasn't going to make something new.

Somewhat recently, A made some banana bread, and his version of banana bread used vanilla extract (along with flour, sugar, bananas (obviously), and coconut oil). Sure, it wasn't a whole vanilla bean like I did for the last challenge, but vanilla is vanilla. Good enough for me since I'm not officially participating anyway. (Normally A uses melted butter to make this, but just for fun he opted to use coconut oil to see how it would turn out this time, and it was good.)

I really like when A makes banana bread since it's not overly sweet, and the magic number for the texture of banana bread we like seems to be three bananas. Since the temperature is kind of warm in our apartment and bananas ripen quickly, it's a good thing we have a tasty banana bread recipe to rely on.

Week 44 - Dehydrating

I wasn't too happy when the Week 44 challenge came up as dehydrating. We don't own a dehydrator, and I certainly wasn't going to buy one for this challenge when we haven't needed one in all the years we've been cooking. You could use dehydrated ingredients, but doing something like throwing raisins into a dish just didn't seem that exciting to me. After doing some research, I found a guide on The Kitchn for making some apple chips in the oven and figured that would work.

I picked up one Fuji apple at the store. I didn't think one apple would yield a ton of chips, but this was more of an experiment than a plan for a week of apple chip snacks. Using only a single apple and some cinnamon also made it a really cheap challenge.

The first thing to do was to slice the apple. We don't have a mandoline, so I did this by hand. I didn't plan it out very well either, because once I started slicing, I realized that the chips were going to be all different sizes. I also was just having one of those days where I was completely unable to make even, thin slices. I had some pieces that were so small that they didn't even seem worth dehydrating, so I got to eat some apple as a snack that afternoon.

The next step was to put the apple slices on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and then dust them with cinnamon. I wasn't able to do that evenly either, which is pretty obvious from the photo. I ended up with quite a few slices with no cinnamon on them and a bunch of cinnamon on the parchment paper, so it all had to be evened out before I could put them in the oven.

Once the apple slices were ready to go, I put them in a 225 degree oven for about an hour and a half. At least that was the plan, but I forgot to set the timer until a few minutes in, so I'm not sure exactly how long they were in there. It was about an hour and a half though. Since the apple slices were just dehydrating, and since they were all different sizes, I just checked to see how some of the "better looking" slices were doing to see when it was done.

The apple chips turned out pretty well in the end, even if the texture was completely uneven. The thicker slices were still on the softer side, and the really thin ones turned out crispy, with most somewhere in the middle. I liked these better than the apple slices you can get packaged which are often a little chewier and just taste more "preserved." Making them at home was also cheaper. If I ever find myself wanting apple chips (which isn't often, but it could happen) or we have apples to use up, I think I'll do it this way again.

Week 46 - Faux-stess

I used to love baking. Cookies, cakes, brownies, it didn't matter. I think it probably had something to do with the soothing and therapeutic aspects of the prep work, especially mixing all the ingredients together. It was also so precise. If you followed a recipe and did exactly what it said, you should be able to get the final product just right. I found it harder to screw up than cooking. The past few years though, as I've been cooking more, the balance has definitely shifted, and I bake far less than I used to. A's been more interested in baking now, and I'm happier tinkering around with savory dinner dishes.

This left me in a difficult spot when it came to the Week 46 challenge and it's faux-stess theme. When it popped up on the list the first time, I was like, "Please don't tell me it's some sort of fake Hostess challenge." Sadly, it was. The task was to make our own version of Hostess foods, or if we didn't like Hostess, we could make another processed food our own. I was drawing a pretty big blank on the second option, other than maybe making a crazy cake to substitute for "processed" cake mix, so that wasn't really going to work. Growing up, I wasn't really a huge fan of Hostess foods. People were devastated when Twinkies disappeared, but I didn't really care. Every so often I'd have one of those chocolate cupcakes with the white swirls, but that was about it (and I didn't really have any interest in making those). This challenge was turning out to be a real pain, but I didn't want to skip it because it was doable. After much googling, I discovered Hostess made brownie bites at some point, so I figured I would just make brownies and be done with it. A couple weeks after the challenge week, to celebrate National Brownie Day yesterday, I finally got around to doing it.

I didn't make just any brownies though. For some time, I'd been really intrigued by the Pioneer Woman's 3 ingredient Nutella brownies. I was so interested that over a year ago, I bought Costco sized containers of Nutella to make many pans full of brownies, so sure that I would love the recipe. (I'm guessing the Nutella might have been on sale, but it's been so long that I don't really remember.) It just seemed so easy. 2.5 cups of Nutella + 1 cup of flour + 3 eggs, baked for 25 minutes at 350 degrees, and you have a batch of delicious chocolate hazelnut brownies. Have I ever mentioned we love chocolate hazelnut a lot?

The mixing part was relatively easy, but after I put it into the greased 13x9 pan, I started having some doubts. I would have expected to bake brownies with that amount of batter in a square pan, but followed the instructions about using the larger rectangular pan. That meant that the batter barely reached the ends of the pan when it was spread out. The layer was so thin. I was worried we were going to end up with some really crispy brownies, but I put it in the oven, crossed my fingers, took a shower, and hoped that when I got out, there wouldn't be a brownie disaster in the oven.

Luckily, the brownies weren't burned to a crisp. But they also didn't rise very much. They weren't much thicker than the layer of batter that went into the pan. While warm, they also fell apart pretty easily even though I had let them cool for a bit. Later in the night, they stayed together a little better, but still not as well as "regular" brownies. It was only after letting them sit overnight in a plastic bag that I think they really got the nice chewy consistency of a good brownie. They really grew on me the second day.

As far as taste, they were okay. We both had high expectations due to our love of chocolate hazelnut, but there wasn't a ton of flavor here - chocolate or hazelnut. Maybe it was because the Nutella was a few months past its best by date, or maybe it just wasn't as powerful of a flavor as we thought it would be. The brownies were fine, definitely edible, but not an experiment we need to try again when there are so many other brownie recipes to explore first.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

I've been in a mood to bake for a while, and more specifically I've been wanting to bake chocolate chip cookies. I've had Kenji's "Best Chocolate Chip Cookie" article saved for a while, and I finally bit the bullet and made them. I didn't have baker's chocolate to chop up so I had to substitute in regular semi-sweet chocolate chips, but other than that I followed his recipe as closely as I could.

The prep is fairly simple and is described in the link above. I will say, though, that I love the smell of browning butter. It's fragrant, buttery, caramel-y, and nutty all at the same time. It's a beautiful thing. After combining all of components, I scooped it into one of our glassware containers to let sit overnight.

After chilling overnight, the dough was ready to be scooped and baked. The recipe says it should make 28 cookies so I decided to make a dozen tonight, a dozen maybe tomorrow, and the last 4 the following night. This, however, is when my reading comprehension starts to fail me. Kenji notes that you should use a 1 oz ice cream scoop or tablespoon to parse out the cookie dough. For whatever reason, I figured our 3 oz ice cream scoop would work just fine. After scooping all 12 cookies out, I finally realized that something didn't look quite right, but by this time I wasn't going to redo things. The oven was preheated, and I wanted to get these in.

Because of the size, I had to adjust the cooking time a slight bit. Kenji recommends 13-16 minutes while rotating front to back and top to bottom rack midway through. I tried that by going 7 minutes and 7 minutes, but they were nowhere near done. I ended up rotating again, cooking 2 minutes, and then rotating a 3rd time, and cooking another 2 minutes. By this time they were starting to approach the proper amount of cooking so I pulled them out, put a small amount of sea salt on top, and waited to move them to the cooling racks.

After very impatiently waiting for the cookies to set a little more, M and I finally grabbed one each. These cookies were still a little too warm so they were still a little too soft. Our impatience was not unrewarded, though. These cookies are really good. They're soft and chewy just like we like them, and they have a good amount of sweetness in the cookie portion to balance the buttery and salty components while fully accenting the chocolate chips. Do I think using chopped chocolate chunks instead of chips would have been better? Maybe, but I'm not really going to complain. I have a feeling M and I will have no trouble devouring all of the cookies I made tonight plus any cookies I make in the coming days.

Week 5 - Vanilla

The theme for week 5 of the 52 week challenge was vanilla. I wasn't sure what to make (and ended up not making the dish until week 7 (this week) anyway so I had plenty of time to think about it). Should we go sweet or savory? Dinner or dessert? I saw a couple of savory recipes that included vanilla but wasn't that enthusiastic about any of them, so I ultimately decided to look for desserts and snacks. All I knew was that I didn't want to just pick a recipe that included vanilla extract (since I've used that before) and wanted to use vanilla beans if possible because that would be new to me.

One of the issues with vanilla beans is that they're really expensive (if you're not buying in bulk online or at Costco). I didn't want to buy too many because I have never really had any use for them before and didn't want to waste them. When we visited Trader Joe's in Henderson, NV during our Vegas escape (since we wanted to see if the Nevada stores carried any different products), we saw that they had vanilla beans in small packs in their spices/baking section. I've never seen this at a Trader Joe's near us. It was $4 for 2 vanilla beans, which isn't cheap, but better than any other deal I could find nearby, so we picked up a package.

I decided to adapt this recipe for macaroons, since it was simple, it used a whole vanilla bean, and I have always really liked macaroons. (I wasn't really in the mood for a white chocolate drizzle so I left that part out.) The macaroons themselves only required a few ingredients:

- 1 large vanilla bean ($2)

- 2 large egg whites ($0.36)

- 1/2 cup sugar ($0.25)

- 9 oz shredded (sweetened) coconut ($3)

The total cost of the recipe was $5.61 and it made 17 macaroons (33 cents each). Not too bad, but the big containers of macaroons at the grocery store around the holidays are probably cheaper per macaroon (even if they aren't exactly the same).

The recipe was really straightforward. First, cut open the vanilla bean and scrape out the seeds. Having never worked with vanilla beans before, I thought (for some reason) that the seeds would be larger and would need to be crushed before using. I really enjoyed this step.

Scrape vanilla bean seeds into a large mixing bowl.

At this point I followed advice that I read somewhere along the way online and put the empty bean pod into a container of sugar to make vanilla sugar. I have no idea what we'll use the vanilla sugar for, but I'm sure we can find something.

Add the sugar and egg whites, and whisk together.

After whisking them all together, the vanilla bean seeds broke up and were just little black flecks in the mixture.

Mix in shredded coconut. The recipe called for 3 cups of shredded coconut. I didn't want to buy that much coconut, so I opted to buy 2 packages (totaling 12 oz) instead, figuring that would just have to do. All the coconut is supposed to be well-coated with the egg mixture and I'm not sure how that could happen if using double the amount (or more) of coconut I used.

Make tablespoon-sized balls of coconut mixture and place on parchment paper on a baking sheet.

Bake at 325 degrees for about 15-20 minutes until the outside of the macaroons are golden brown. Remove from oven and allow to cool.

I tried the macaroons when they were warm and they were so deliciously gooey. Once they cooled completely, they were still crunchy on the outside and sticky on the inside, but a little less gooey. You can really see the little black flecks of vanilla bean when you look at the macaroons. We liked them.

Focusing on the vanilla (since it's the theme of the week), the vanilla bean didn't seem to add much more than vanilla extract would have. A's thought was that, since vanilla beans are expensive, this might not be the best use for them, and he's probably right about that. Now to figure out what to do with the other vanilla bean and the box of vanilla sugar...